


Sisyphus

by hypnodisc



Category: teen wolf - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Do-Over, Murder, Suicide, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 17:57:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5794240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypnodisc/pseuds/hypnodisc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles Stillinski dies alone in the basement of an abandoned hospital, fingers long since too numb and useless to finish stitching himself closed. Three minutes later, and seventeen years earlier, he arrives in a different hospital, grey and screaming and weighing about as much as a bag of sugar. Time travel; or something like that. Maybe something he has to do, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know and it happens again and again and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eternal Return

Stiles Stillinski dies alone in the basement of an abandoned hospital, fingers long since too numb and useless to finish stitching himself closed. Three minutes later, and seventeen years earlier, he arrives in a different hospital, grey and screaming and weighing about as much as a bag of sugar. Time travel; or something like that. Maybe something he has to do, but he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know and it happens again and again and again.

Naturally, a kind of fatigue sets in. There’s only so many times that you can sit at your mother’s deathbed while she quietly slips away, and still feel that devastating shock of loss. Only so many childhoods that can be spent enjoying the feeling of having a mother, until you start to wish that she would just hurry up and get on with it already. Until motherly hugs are smothering, and you’re impatient for the interesting part of your life to begin. 

There’s only so many tens of years you can spend caring for your father – saving him from alcoholism, taking care of his heart, keeping him from drinking or eating himself into an early grave, until you start encouraging the drinking. Getting it over with. 

Stiles’ love and admiration for his father was long gone. Maybe it was something in Stiles that twisted his father in his grief. Maybe Stiles was just too strange, too different, too much to cope with, or maybe the truth was worse, maybe if Stiles hadn’t spent the early years after his mother’s (first) death hiding from the world in his bedroom, he would have met the monster that grief and drink made of his father. Later, it was the resentment that coaxed him to slip the bottles of whiskey into his jacket at the supermarket, to leave them on the kitchen counter for his father to find. Sometimes Stiles imagined that his father knew who was leaving the bottles out for him, that he was doing this because he knew that it was what Stiles wanted. He never covered the bruises, after. And the agony in his father’s eyes when he realised what he was doing to his own son gave Stiles a twisted satisfaction. Once, after a difficult day at work, his dad really had gone too far, and Stiles had smothered him with a pillow. He didn’t fight back very much, but whether that was the booze or the guilt, Stiles wasn’t sure.

No matter how hard he tried, he had never saved the Hales. Kate was, after all, very well equipped to fight the supernatural. There’s not much an eight year old boy or even the entire Beacon Hills police department can do to overpower a group of hunters, no matter how well-prepared or brimming with magic. Sometimes he had managed one or two more family members safe, but they always left town never to return. It hardly seemed worth it.

The first time he’d been sent back he’d determined to do everything right this time. Save everyone and work behind the scenes to get everyone a happy ever after ending. He’s excited – he can see his mom again, experience the relative peace and warmth that were his early childhood. But then he gets caught up in his mother, and then she’s gone, and before he knows it, it’s too late. He’s spent so long caught up in grief (It’s worse this time, he truly realises the gravity of it. He stops eating, he stops talking, just lies in bed and his dad can’t stand to look at him). All of a sudden, it comes to him in a rush when he sees a distant cloud of black smoke from his bedroom window. He’s missed his chance, he’s failed already because of his selfishness. And so, as his father rushes out with the cruiser to see what he can do (sorry kid, I won’t be too long, alright? Try to get some sleep.), Stiles staggers dizzily to the kitchen, snatches the chef’s knife from the block and, hands shaking, cuts deeply into both of his wrists. 

He wakes up in the hospital, naturally. At first, a little disoriented not to be a baby. He’d probably underestimated the actual strength required to kill oneself with a knife. Many deaths later, he learned that his magic had likely also had something to do with it – fighting to keep him alive, if not actually heal him.

So, he’s in the hospital, his hands are tied to the bed, and he has no idea what he’s going to say to his dad. He figures the sheriff isn’t going to let the silence continue, once other people are actually paying attention and judging his competence as a father. He resigns himself to “recovering” as quickly as possible, and trying again as soon as he can slip away.

“It was all a mistake” is what he says, his dad is eager to believe him, and when they get home, his father passes out on the couch watching him pretend to sleep, and Stiles takes the gun from his belt and wakes him up with the sound of his son’s mostly painless second death.


	2. Listless

The third time, he plans as best he can to save the Hales. His mother’s death is not so bad this time round, but he still cries, and sits curled up with his catatonic father in front of the TV for days. He sets out, equipped with the sidearm to which he feels a morbid attachment, and is mercilessly murdered at eight years old by a cooing Kate, who is apparently not even curious enough to ask him what kind of supernatural creature he is, before gleefully shooting him in the chest with a poison-tipped arrow. Stiles is dying painfully slowly to the sound of Kate Argent mocking him in a baby voice. Tuning it out, he realises that going in to a situation with a shitty plan, guns blazing, is perfectly fine when you’ve got an experienced pack behind you, but when it’s just you, in a skinny child’s body, you really need a home-alone level of forward planning, or maybe some kind of superpower. 

Other than the time-traveling immortality thing, of course. 

But it seems like, again and again, his complex and detailed plans are not enough. Every time, he finds himself too slow, or too late, or too dead to do anything to stop the deaths of the Hale pack. He’s been burned alive with them, shot or stabbed to death by the hunters, but most often he was forced to take his own life, to get another shot at saving them. As Stiles’ many lives went by, there had actually had to be some quite inventive suicides which needed to overcome not only his natural lack of resources, being essentially a child, but also his body’s amazing will to survive. There was something in him, his spark maybe, that desperately clung on to life, even though he knew that his mother’s bright, tired smile was waiting for him on the other side. The gun was usually pretty certain, though. Final.

It’s around the seventeenth or eighteenth time, that he meets the monster his father becomes with the drink. It makes sense that he hadn’t encountered this before, being so busy with planning and working around the time of his mother’s death and then dead afterwards one way or another. But this time he’s just so exhausted, and so he stays at home and tries to rekindle the attachment he had always felt to his father. But there’s something like malevolence in the sheriff’s eyes when he spits at Stiles that he’s not welcome, not wanted. He blames him for Claudia’s sickness (Stiles hadn’t loved her enough, hadn’t even cried at her funeral and he’s sorry so sorry but the sheriff slaps his face, holds him still by his chin and tells him he wishes Stiles had died instead. He laughs hollowly when Stiles just lowers his eyes, too tired to argue.) 

Stiles learns to dread the return to a child’s body – weak, vulnerable, dependant. But he can’t run away, can’t just let it all happen, so he stays, accepting the abuse as punishment for failing, again and again, to protect those he loves. (For failing, a quiet voice says, to love his father).

Shaky and brittle, he gives up on any hope of fighting the hunters, and tries to warn the Hales instead; but he’s just a human kid and they won’t give him the time of day, never mind believe him. Derek even sneers and pushes him onto the ground, and all Stiles can do is stare bewilderedly at a 16-year old teenager who just assaulted a little boy. There are tears in his eyes partly from the shock, from the pain and jarring of old bruises, and a little from the desperation, but Stiles’ whole mind is occupied by a dark suspicion that is creeping up on him. Things aren’t just bad this time, they’re worse. Much worse than he remembers. What if he wasn’t just traveling to the same time again and again? What if, with each successive death, the world was getting darker? Every life he’d wasted wallowing, or blindly running around, every life he’d simply cut short, instead of taking time to research – he’d been so stupid. His father would never have - 

No, something is happening


End file.
